Boosters

"We are participating in these massive experiments in behavioral psychology; organizational behavior.  We are the lab rats."

"Change itself really overwhelms people's brains and it does really bad things to people ... when you think about new antidepressant drugs; when a pharmaceutical company develops one, you can't just test it out on humans and see what happens.  So they start them out on rats to see if they work.  But then the question becomes, how do you make a rat depressed ~ to see if the antidepressant works? ... they had to come up with something and this is it: unpredictable chronic mild stress protocol.  All they do is make tiny changes in the rat's environment.  So you tilt its cage a little bit; or you change its bedding, you put in wet bedding; or you put in shavings that have urine and feces from a different animal, from a different rat; or you might change the cycle of night and day to throw it off; or play sounds of a predator bird for ten minutes and then stop ... you just make small changes, but they have to be unpredictable."

Dan Lyons, describing his book, Lab Rats

I strongly recommend the whole video; Lyons is an excellent, relaxed speaker and a realist.  I haven't read the book yet, but the premise fits my own experience with working in office environments, particularly the sort where training sessions and purposeless work was de rigueur.

I find the above piece interesting, as it suggests that anti-depressant drugs don't actually remove depression; they simply stop you from caring about the momentary discomforts and inconsistencies that cause stress.  This explains so much about the behaviour of those friends I've had who were put on anti-depressants, as was my first wife, after she became a quadrapelegic.  They don't "free" you to think positively about things.  They simply cause you not to care about the constant changes going on around you.  I should go to the hospital because something is wrong?  Whatever.  The boss has cut my pay by 20%?  Sure.  My team won the superbowl?  Meh.  Anti-depressants even you out; and apparently, since they're designed to help this rat live in some other rat's feces, that makes a lot of sense now.

 Lyons talks about the effort that companies make to sell you on things as "amazing experiences," innundating the discussion with allusions to other people who were moved or changed by this experience you're about to have, or how this seminar revitalized other players in the industry, or how hugely successful people swear by this technique or that "tool" where it comes to their success.  This tactic is said to work; it is said to achieve results; but if you've never been a part of a company seminar, allow me to bring you up to speed.

First of all, the person who BUYS the seminar is never part of the group who TAKE the seminar.  You take it because you're told to, because your job is at stake, and you are not given a choice.  You're also told its for the good of the company and success and all that, but you don't go because it's good for the company.  You go because it's your job.

Secondly, the people who enjoy seminars are the same people who plague their co-workers' lives with frivilous noise that steadily becomes antagonizing.  For example:  I once worked in a payables department of a 350+ retail chain, on a floor with 125 other people.  And every time someone on the floor had a birthday, a birthday party was organized.  With this many people, it means (with some double and even a triple-birthday) that you're being asked to leave your desk for twenty minutes in order to a) sing and b) cheerfully participate.  The sort of people who love to organize birthday parties are work love seminars.  Let's call these people "boosters."

Yes, it is just like Office Space.

As a seminar-selling company representative, it is your job to sell the boss on the whole "this would be great for the company" spin, so your boss knows what to say when it gets sold to YOU.  And then, it is your job to pretend to like it, while being around a small percentage of boosters who actually like it.  Boosters are nobodies; they never get promoted past a minimal management position, but they are always the first to report any lack of enthusiasm.  Guess how much fun this is?  Yes, that's right.  It is like laying in a cage full of someone else's shit.

On every level, reading most online content related to D&D is chock full of boosterism.  The pattern is somewhat predictable.  Begin with a good hard sale of the game preferably by connecting it with some very recent cultural phenomenon, like Stranger Things or Game of Thrones.  Nevermind that D&D dwarfs these things in staying power, we must first prove the game has legitimacy by attaching it to something hugely popular with scads of people who will never play an RPG.

Next, talk about how hugely popular D&D is.  Yes, okay, we just had to put a crutch under it's arm to give you a reason to care, but that just proves how HUGELY popular this roleplaying game is.  While pitching the game on its merits, be sure to talk about the vast number of genres and mythologies it embraces, and how wonderful it is because of all the complexity and imagination of structure in includes.  Don't worry about saying this, because in the very next paragraph we're going to talk about YOU won't have any problem at all stepping into the game and becoming instantly popular with your friends.  After all, it uses just pencils and paper!  It's not like it's so complicated it needs modern technology!

From here, it's all over the map.  The dice are fun, there are all these great books, the new character sheets get rid of any need for you to do math, and hey!  You don't need rules.  Rules are for suckers.  And so, just like that, you're ready to play!  Yay you!

I know a lot of these web pages pitch so hard because they're selling something on the side: dice or sheets or whatever.  Most of the comments are obviously sock-puppets because there's a scam being sold here.  But I also know that a fair number of the commenters ARE actual players, because we see these same people on every post in the game's blogosphere.  Someone writes a fairly humdrum, middle-of-the-road post on running an elf in a campaign, with no new ideas, pretty much the same stuff we can find in Dragon Magazines forty years ago ... and someone comments, "Great article!  Best ever!  I can't wait to run my next elf!"

I find myself raising an eyebrow at that recently appeared rat turd and thinking, "There's no way that's mine."

Now, I will measure my commitment to this game, its concept, its value and its brilliance against anyone's.  I don't just talk, I do.  And if you, dear reader, were to sit across from me at a table and ask me to talk about D&D all night, I will talk your ear right off your head.  But this boosterism is crap.  The game's genius is not based on how cool the elf character is.  It outclasses garbage television sputum on levels I can't begin to describe ~ as evidenced by the graveyard of ex-fantasy television shows and films that a very few still remember (all once used to boost D&D).  I don't think it is particularly relevant to sell dice and character sheets to would-be players ~ that's like being concerned with what the boss gets out of the seminar we're being forced to attend.

What I do think is there is a small number of people who simply like to boost stuff.  Who also, unfortunately, know how to find a keyboard with their fingers.  They don't really care what they're boosting ~ in a year or two it will be whatever the new show is on Netflix or Disney+ ... and five years after that it will be whatever pyramid scheme they've got themselves into.  But this is what's come across their plate right now so damn it, they're going to boost this to the moon.  It's a damn pity they never seem to have any real, useful advice to give ~ that is, that hasn't already been written down or vlogged by a hundred other people already.

I'm sorry to say this; it sounds like an excuse or some Aesop's Fable, but the boosterism is certain to break hearts.  Thinking about those seminars, that small, sarcastic crew I inevitably found myself standing with did hate those long afternoons, but hell ~ we were being paid and we weren't dumb enough to fall for that crap.  The boosters were just riding the wave.  The really sad group, however, were those young enough or desperate enough to try to buy into the bullshit.  They didn't know what the kool-aid was, they didn't know why they were drinking it, all they knew ~ or thought ~ was that if they wanted to get ahead in the business world, they had to really buy in and believe.  And I don't doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of tombstones in the hearts of little children who built up their hopes, bought the books, paid the emotional cost for admission and ended up feeling stupid ... and ashamed to admit they ever tried to play.  I don't doubt there have been millions of pristine copies of D&D books and modules, at $60 a copy,  that were pulped or found their way into landfills, because the spines were never cracked often enough to get beat up with playing.  I'm sure those would-be DMs, who were told, "It's surprisingly easy to get into the game," learned instead that it is surprising how little real information or help they were given, once they had the books in their hands.

I'm sure, because I've met these people far, far more often than I've randomly met real players.

Of the five people at work (besides myself) who have an interest in D&D, one DMs.  One used to play but hasn't played in two years.  And three have never played.  They'd like to.  And they've asked me to run them.  But I can't do it because I simply cannot take on another campaign; and I can't fold these people into the campaigns that are already stuffed.  There's no point in giving them one game, because what would that accomplish?  Should I invite you over to my huge, palace-like house to swim in my pool and hang in my jacuzzi, only to tell you it will never happen again?  I'm not that kind of asshole.

Ten thousand boostering webpages and all the flippery they sell will not fill the hole inside people who always wanted to play but could not learn how.  It's just making kool-aid and pushing it for these people to drink, "for their own good."  I know now that what's needed will never come to pass: D&D has become one of the worst scams on the internet ... and I often feel ashamed to have ever been any part of it.

I've tried to change that.  I've tried to build an island of sanity.  But it is a very, very tiny island; and not at all on the radar.  It cannot compare with the cacophony of voices screaming how wonderful it is that the game is complex, and how wonderful it is that the game is so easy to play.

Maybe writing a blog is my form of anti-depressant.